The Butterfly Thieves

Chapter Six

The therapy room was a bit of a joke. It was a normal looking small room, something that looked like that was added on a part of the house. The thing was the size of a walk-in closet, with a love seat in one corner and an office chair in the other. Above his small white, there were binders and binders full of paper that were falling apart everywhere.

"On the couch, sit," he said locking the door.

I turned around swiftly, staring at him. "What are you doing?"

"Locking the door? It's good to keep everything in."

"Let me out," I said, feeling my breath starting to get shorter.

"Milly, it's okay. Just breathe."

"You're going to rape me!" I said panicking, backing away from him.

He shook his head and held his hands up. "I'm not going to harm you. I'm not going to hurt you, or do anything to you without telling you first. I will never lay a hand on you here. You're safe. Please, sit."

I looked to the couch, but only sat when he sat in his chair. I could feel my shoulders were very tense, but I couldn't get myself to let loose. It was a little hard to when the guy that drugged you was blocking the only door.

He took his clipboard as he did upstairs in my room. He started writing something on it, and I cringed. Maybe he wasn't a real therapist, and this was just his fantasy. For ten minutes he wrote things out, scribbling away. He was killing me slowly.

"Milly, how are you feeling today?"

"Go to hell," I spat.

"Alrighty then," he said, writing on his clipboard. Five minutes went by without any words up in the air.

I hated how calm he was. "You have to stop that."

He raised an eyebrow and looked up from his board. "Stop what? I'm sorry."

"Your positive fucking attitude. It's annoying as hell and I hate you. I threw a plate at you! It made you bleed! And all you can do is just fuckin smile about it? What type of crazy are you?"

He was quiet for a while, then put a finger to his chin. "Why does me being positive annoy you?"

I twisted my lips. "You're supposed to yell, scream, hurt me! You kidnapped me. And-d-d you are the bad-d-d guy!" I said, tripping and rolling over every other word. "You can't be nice."

"Why can't I be nice?"

"Because that's not how it's supposed to work."

"Ah, I see. So, would you prefer that I tie you up and beat you?"

I shrugged. I was starting to feel like the crazy one. He was making me laugh. Just for a second though. "At least I would know how to react to that."

"How would you react if I did that?"

I shrugged again. "I guess I would know. Like, I would be scared and I could deal with that."

"And me being nice?"

"It makes me feel weird."

"How so?"

"Like . . . well . . . I'm supposed to be scared of you, but I'm starting not to feel that way so much now."

He smiled. "That's good, I don't want you scared. We just want you happy."

"Who is we?"

"Mmh?"

"We? What do you mean by we?"

"Oh. Me and the community, that is if you choose to go. But Earnest Town, it's built on curing people and having a happy community. It's made up of people just like you and me, lost, depressed, hopeless. Yet, Earnest Town will take us in. They want us to be happy. We just want you happy."

I stared at him, and just shook my head. "Sounds like a cult."

He laughed. "It's your choice. Anyways, back to the way you are feeling about being here. So, why don't you feel scared?"

"Because you don't yell. It's weird."

"Do a lot of people in your life yell at you?"

"I guess."

"They do."

I narrowed my eyes. "And let me guess, you saw people yelling at me."

"Well, it's hard not to look at you when Mikey is screaming at you. In public. I never saw what he was like behind closed doors. Milly, what was he like?"

I shrugged. "He's a good guy."

"Milly, you don't have to lie here. You don't have to pretend he's a good guy. You don't have to make him look better. You don't have to do that anymore."

He struck a nerve. I didn't like how he knew. He didn't say it, but I know that he knew about the yelling, the forcing himself on me, the hitting. Never in the face, the back and the legs mostly.

I felt my eyes tear up.

"You shouldn't know any of this."

He just gave a pitying look, making me hate him more. "It's okay Milly."

"Mikey was a bastard. I wanted to leave him a million times, but I couldn't."

"Why couldn't you?"

"Because . . . I tried once, and he almost killed me."

The face that Thomas had, no ghost in the world could have been paler than him in that moment. "Can you tell me about that?"

"I tried 6 months ago. I snuck away, I was going to live with a friend. Mikey found out from my phone messages. He tracked me down. Got me alone, and held a gun to my head. Told me that it's either I'm with him, or dead. Because he was sure I couldn't live with myself if I left him."

Thomas's face turned red. He was actually mad, and it was what I wanted, but not like this.

"I mean, it's just-"

Thomas cut me off, "No. No making excuses for that bastard. You deserve a lot better than that treatment. Lots better. I hope they catch that bastard."

"It's okay, really."

He just shook his head, and look at his watch. "Hour is almost up."

"Wait, really?"

He got a small smile. "Time runs fast when you're having fun."